REMEMBERING MT-USA AND VINCENT 'FAB VINNIE' HANLEY. BY SANDRA HARRIS.

 

REMEMBERING MT-USA AND VINCENT ‘FAB VINNIE’ HANLEY.

BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

MT-USA was a fuppin’ musical-television sensation that we Irish hugely appreciated, because back in the early-to-mid 1980s, also known as the Dark Ages, we only had two television channels, RTE ONE and RTE (can you guess it?) TWO (haha, well done, lol), and our only musical-television programme was TOP OF THE POPS, which aired for half an hour every Thursday night.

Not that I didn’t live for that one precious half hour a week, I did, I totally did. Knowing the Number One chart single for the week was as important to me as, well, as something really, really important, if you get me, and I genuinely probably would’ve stopped breathing if they’d taken it off the air for some reason.

But, in 1984, a phenomenon occurred. Mt-USA, or Music-Television USA, its slogan being ‘Music Never Looked Better.’ And it never did! Three hours of a television show on a Sunday afternoon, from two in the afternoon till about five. All the biggest American music hits of the day (and plenty of British and Irish acts too) and the (mostly) fantastic videos that accompanied them.

Modelled on MTV, which had started up in 1981, but this show had the advantage of being owned by an Irish company called Green Apple Productions, founded by Irish disc jockey, Vincent Hanley, who also presented the programme, and Conor McAnally, an Irish television producer and son of actor Ray McAnally.

Vincent, or ‘Fab Vinnie’ as he became known, was Ireland’s first gay celebrity, though, at the time of his success with MT-USA, we didn’t really know it. Ireland in the ‘Eighties was a country still in the grip of the Catholic Church, and the Church did not condone ‘gayness.’ Or sex outside of marriage, or single parenthood, or women having control over their own lives and even their own bodies.

(No kidding, we were such a draconian and yet simultaneously backwards country that I once got into awful trouble at home for saying the word, ‘pregnant’ at the dinner table, when aged about fourteen or fifteen. ‘Where did you hear that word?’ my mother snapped, faster than a velociraptor diving on a piece of people meat.)

Homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland until the 1990s, and I have no idea what it must have been like trying to live your life here as a gay man or woman. I know that, in England, gay men had actually done jail time for the ‘crime’ of being sexually attracted to one’s own sex. I don’t know if we did that here (it seems like such a barbaric thing to do!), but I think maybe a fair few gay Irish people just packed up and went to America until it was ‘safe’ to come back.

Vincent himself left Ireland for England, then suddenly upped and left Capital Radio in London, where he’d been since 1981 and where he was on the verge of becoming absolutely huge as a disc-jockey, and disappeared to the United States in 1984. Did he know then that he was HIV-positive? I don’t know. Maybe only his closest friends knew, or at least suspected. Vinnie never really talked about stuff like that, and he denied to the end that he had AIDS.

Vincent Hanley, born in Clonmel in County Tipperary in 1954, had such a relaxed, friendly and easy style as a front-man. The show would play four or five hits in a row, then Vinny would come on and have a chat to camera about some aspect or other of American culture, or he might actually be gabbing to a real-life American person or even a celebrity. He’d wear these little jackets over a shirt or jumper with a scarf round his neck, just chatting away easily with the gift of the gab that he got from being Irish, haha.

He’d be standing in Times Square or Central Park or Fifth Avenue and it all just looked so gorgeous and sophisticated to us Irish, most of whom, like myself, had probably never had cause to leave the town they were born in. This, what Vinnie was doing, this was living, real living. How impressed and envious were we? I would say very, lol.

And the music, oh my God, the music! And the mind-blowing videos! It was sheer Music Heaven for a pop-obsessed young one like myself. I was supposed to be doing homework on Sunday afternoons, but if I brought some textbooks into the sitting-room and played at being studious when anyone looked in on me, I’d usually be fine for the three hours.

 A decade or so earlier, QUEEN had popularised the music video with the fantabulous one they made to accompany their smash hit BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, and MT-USA were always playing QUEEN’s ‘Eighties hits, like the television-friendly RADIO GA-GA, with the video featuring clips from Fritz Lang’s silent movie, METROPOLIS.

 I WANT TO BREAK FREE had the four QUEEN lads dressing up in hilarious drag in the style of famous British soap opera CORONATION STREET, but, ironically, the Yanks disapproved of the cross-dressing element and they’d never heard of CORRIE. The Irish lapped it up, though, and I loved every QUEEN video MT-USA ever played for our delectation.

We were living then, you see, in a magical era when the music video popularised the song and made people rush out and buy the single. The better the video, therefore, the more likely you were to buy the single. Music videos became almost like little films. We Irish were fascinated by them. We couldn’t get enough of them. It was truly the age of the music video.

Remember that terrific one for Austrian heart-throb Falco’s world smasheroonie AMADEUS? It was made by Austrian film director Hannes Rossacher and Austrian film producer Rudi Dolezal and, to this day, I just can’t stop watching it, though now it has to be on You-Tube.

Duran Duran were a band that were always making fancy videos, some of them, like the one for WILD BOYS, completely and utterly incomprehensible, but who cared? Just being able to see the lads, three of whom I had massive crushes on, every Sunday afternoon on MT-USA, was compensation enough…!

ZZ Top were always turning up on the show. Sometimes, their three big hits would be shown in a row, GIMME ALL YOUR LOVING, SHARP-DRESSED MAN and LEGS. The video for GIMME ALL YOUR LOVING was pure awesome, there’s no other word for it, the three gorgeous women in the fabulous car grabbing hold of the grubby lad at the petrol station and taking him for the ride of his life.

Looking back, it’s fairly obvious when they kick him out of the car, all dishevelled and minus his boots, that the poor lad has been gang-raped, but he didn’t seem to be too worried about it, so we viewers didn’t worry either…!

So many iconic videos in the period from 1984 to 1987! Remember Robert Palmer’s ADDICTED TO LOVE, and the video with the black-haired chicks with the long legs playing guitar? Dads all over Ireland stopped trying to get ‘the feckin’ fire to light’ and sat back on their heels and goggled through their steamed-up glasses at the hottest spectacles they’d seen since the last time they’d built the bonfire out the back and the Mammy’s washing caught fire.

And Cyndi Lauper’s GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN, Pat Benatar’s LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD, Don Henley’s THE BOYS OF SUMMER, Bryan Adams’s RUN TO YOU (the only song of his I could ever tolerate) Michael Jackson’s THRILLER and OWNER OF A LONELY HEART by the magnificent YES. Men at work, the Stranglers, Madonna, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie, the Pet Shop Boys, all present and correct on the good old MT-USA. HELLO…? Is it me you’re looking for?

Also in the mix were Susannah Hoffs and her beautiful Bangles with their monster hit MANIC MONDAY, German Nena with her 99 RED BALLOONS, F. R. David with the gorgeous WORDS, the Kids from FAME with hits from the show, Bonnie Tyler with TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART, Ultravox with VIENNA and Spandau Ballet and Marillion and Culture Club and Howard Jones and an absolute ton of other popular acts of the day. 

 FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD showed up too. The video for TWO TRIBES featured American President Ronald Reagan (not the real one, of course!) and the Russian Konstantin Chernenko, the then Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (again, I presume not the real one, though in fairness I always though it was Boris Yeltsin in the ring!), beating the living daylights out of each other to one of the best basslines ever created. (After QUEEN’s ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST, of course!)

The violent video was probably banned on TOP OF THE POPS, much as the BBC had banned the playing of Frankie’s first single, RELAX, because of the naughty lyrics. But MT-USA had no such scruples, and the video to TWO TRIBES was one of my favourites of that period.

The show ended in 1987. Fab Vinnie, sadly, didn’t survive it for more than a few months. He died of an AIDS-related illness the same year, aged only thirty-three. Apparently, he’d been extremely ill while making the last episodes of MT-USA. Looking back now, I can see the gauntness and the tiredness in his previously healthy, cheerful and mostly smiling face.

It’s so sad to think of him having to put a brave, smiley face on for the television cameras, and even sadder that he- and others- may have unknowingly left a country intolerant of gays only to fly straight into the clutches of AIDS in American cities like New York, Chicago or San Francisco.

The men- and women- who died of this horrible disease in the 1980s had it so very bad. The doctors and scientists hadn’t yet hit upon ways to keep people with AIDS alive for longer or even particularly comfortable during this frightening decade. Even Queen’s Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991, missed out on the- well, not the cure, exactly, but the life-lengthening-and-life-improving treatments of which patients were able to avail not too long after.  

Vincent Hanley has the ‘distinction’ of being the first Irish celebrity to die of AIDS. I’ll always remember him personally as the man who brought us Irish the music. MT-USA was the best music show I’ve ever watched in my life, and Vincent Hanley was the gentle, warm, funny Irish fella who presented it. Rest in peace, Vinnie. You’re a legend.